The real problem with telling young writers to fan out across genres and forms is that it doesn’t help them find a voice. If anything, it’s antivoice. Learning the craft of writing isn’t about hopping texts like hyperlinks. It’s about devotion and obsession. It’s about lingering too long in some beloved book’s language, about steeping yourself in someone else’s style until your consciousness changes colour. It’s Tolkien phases and Plath crushes. It’s going embarrassingly, un...

They had five days to play (Ultima IV), and I asked them to make as much progress as they could in that time. When we gathered to debrief in class, a few students explained how they’d overcome some of their difficulties, but the vast majority was utterly flummoxed by the game. As one of them put it, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” After removing the arrow from my chest, I asked them to explain why.
It mostly came dow...

Gamified instruction empowers students to own their learning.
Students who learn in a gamified classroom have a better capacity for persistence.
Gamified instruction helps students develop a capacity for selfdirection.
Gamified classrooms impart critical social skills.
Gamification of learning enables students to build and sustain learning communities.
Gamified instruction is inherently democratic and meritocratic and hence encourages risk taking.
Gamified instruction helps students maintain ...

The first study to assess directly the risk of cancer after CT scans in childhood found a clear dose-response relationship for both leukemia and brain tumors: risk increased with increasing cumulative radiation dose. For a cumulative dose of between 50 and 60 milligray or mGy (mGy is a unit of estimated absorbed dose of ionizing radiation) to the head, the investigators reported a threefold increase in the risk of brain tumors; the same dose to bone marrow (the part of the body responsible fo...

The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a
good deal of thought and analysis to the methodological importance
f°r work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first
s t eP. a point of departure, a beginning principle.11 A major lesson I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a
merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have
to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows
from them. Nowhere in my experien...

The other way was if you do various kinds of mumbo-jumbo then this great agent in the sky will come down and give you eternal life, in which case you could have an infinite number of sports cars. And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t...

Much the same can be said of the Thrips, those tiny plant insects that haven't so much as a decent singular to their name, one wished to specify an individual Thrips. You may speak many Thrips, or of one Thrips, but never of one Thrip, how strongly you may feel that such a ruling is in restraint of 'our personal liberties. Nor may you employ the word Thripses to mean one or more Thrips, convenient as it might be in a pinch. The New English Dictionary states, with what end in view I don't know...

Piet Hut, another Dutch astronomer fifty years younger than Jan Oort, decided to take seriously the possibility that comet showers are periodic. If they are periodic, the theory that they are caused by the random passing-by of alien stars cannot be right. If showers are periodic, they must be explained by a different theory. Piet Hut and his friend Rich Muller found an alternative theory to explain the periodicity in case it turns out to be real. The alternative theory is called Nemesis. Neme...

To understand why comet showers occur, we go back to the Oort Cloud. The theory of comet showers was worked out by Jack Hills, an American physicist now at Los Alamos. He realized that the movements of the comets in the Oort Cloud are not entirely random. Comets in the cloud are generally moving in random directions, but if a comet happens to be moving in an orbit almost exactly toward the Sun, it will not survive for long. A comet in an orbit coming close to the Sun may get boiled away and d...

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every...